In large research and development (R&D) organizations, where products are developed at different sites around the globe, architecture and management communications are of the essence. Making a judgment call on architectural changes requires the perspectives of different stakeholders, users, or user types who often communicate in different languages. This diversity of the architectural languages, modeling approaches, design methodologies, best practices, and experiences introduces several challenges. These challenges include creating a common understanding and accurate visibility into a product's current architecture, and evaluating and determining where to invest efforts of re-engineering existing products as well as generating a new architecture-centric evolution plan for the portfolio at large.